December 14, 2009 Posted by alan jones

Have a cool Yule

I’m away to Byron Bay for the remainder of 2009. The house, dog and chooks are all to be minded by friends and family, the car is packed, and once I’ve finished this blog post, I’m done for the year. While I’ll have a laptop, iPhone and camera with me on the North Coast, I don’t expect to be blogging much, so this is probably it for 2009. So I’ll take this opportunity... read more

December 8, 2009 Posted by alan jones

Want your OS X spellchecker to use Australian English?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve ignored the spell-checker used by most word processing apps in OS X because I haven’t been able to get them to switch from US English (if you can call that “English”) to AU English (”strine, mate”). Today, it finally drove me batty enough to find a solution. It was difficult to describe in a blog post so I’ve knocked together this quick little screencast.... read more

October 30, 2009 Posted by alan jones

I won a Perkler tee shirt!

Wow, i do not photograph well But I won this very nice tee shirt in a random draw after completing a user survey on Perkler.com. Yay for me! And I thought it was the right thing to do to thank the Perkler guys with a quick post. Full disclosure: Perkler is a Pollenizer client and I do some work through Pollenizer. I haven’t personally worked on Perkler. So while I’m conflicted to a certain... read more

October 29, 2009 Posted by alan

The Errol Flynn Skill Set

Gavin Heaton and Mark Pollard are curating A Perfect Gift For A Man — a book about manhood arising from the blogosphere’s contributions to Reach Out and Triple J’s Man Week project. There’s #manweek on Twitter too. UPDATE: there’s now an ebook and a printed book (AUD$44.95) available through Blurb. The following contribution didn’t make the book but that’s because the... read more

October 7, 2009 Posted by alan jones

When “GPS” stands for Granny Positioning System

I get my highly-developed sense of adventure from my parents. They can smell a new adventure a hundred miles away, like a shark can sense a wounded fish or a Cliff Swallow the way back to San Juan Capistrano. My parents are nomads, grey ghosts, semi-retirees on the road. My dad works locum gigs for other chiropractors and he and my mum get to see a lot of the countryside, getting from town-to -town in a... read more

September 21, 2009 Posted by alan jones

I’ve been away, under the sea

Mother humpback, baby, Scott and Mel Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy The last few weeks I’ve been off the matrix, in Tonga, with my wife Mel and son Alec as Scott from www.swimmingwithgentlegiants.com has taken us up close and underwater with humpback whales and their young calves. It’s been a wonderful experience but two weeks with no internet access means I now have a lot of backlog... read more